Child's body had disturbing signs of abuse: Jarvis DeBerry

According to Jefferson Parish authorities, 40-year-old Janella Lewis claimed that she'd just been giving her 2-year-old grandson your standard, run-of-the-mill whuppin. Apparently, he'd been getting out of line.

Janella Lewis

Two-year-olds are so willful, so full of fight, so strapping and wild that really, the only way to control them is to break them. Otherwise, they might grow up not knowing the importance of minding their elders.

Overwhelming physical discipline does have a slight risk, though. It can be so righteously and passionately applied that the child in need of the discipline doesn't grow up at all.

It appears that Titus Gooseberry wasn't tough enough to survive his grandmother's muscular correction. He was beaten to death by Lewis in January, officials with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office say. His 2-year-old body reportedly showed startling evidence of physical abuse, including the shape of a foot in his back.

Was that foot part of the discipline the grandmother deemed necessary for the unruly child?

The boy "got tied up in her feet while she tried to put out the trash, and she stepped on him," the detective said Lewis told him. "She said she dusted him off, changed his clothing and put him to bed." Shortly after her arrest, Col. John Fortunato, a spokesman for the Sheriff's Office, gave an additional detail from Lewis' account. According to Fortunato, she said the boy fell down the stairs while she was taking out the trash and that she accidentally stepped on his back while trying to keep him from falling.

We can rest easier knowing that Titus didn't die of a beating -- or from a spanking. No, he died of injuries he sustained in your average, falling down the stairs while lead-foot grandma is taking out the trash incident. It's quite the common occurrence.

Except that Titus began vomiting blood. Then he stopped breathing. He was already dead when he made it to a local hospital. Doctors who saw the injuries called the Sheriff's Office.

The U.S. Department of Justice has published a portable guide for investigators looking into child abuse allegations and what it terms battered child syndrome. "A major trait of abusive caretakers," it reads, "is either the complete lack of an explanation for critical injuries or explanations that do not account for the severity of injuries."

Caretakers who are questioned about deaths of children almost always change their stories, the guide says. In Lewis' case, she said the boy suffered some injuries in a car accident in Texas, an accident that authorities determined was fictional.

Also, what Lewis says happens to Titus is apparently what many caretakers have said of children found dead in their care. "In child homicide cases ... investigators will learn quickly about 'killer couches,' 'killer stairs,' and 'killer cribs'," the Justice Department's document says. "However, studies show that children do not die in falls from simple household heights; they do not even suffer severe head injuries from such falls."

Nor, is it likely that a child would die because his grandmother accidentally stepped on him.

"The coroner actually said it was the worst lacerated liver she had ever seen," Detective Burke testified in court last week. "She said when she cut him open, a piece of his liver popped out."

As should be clear from her far-fetched explanations for the boy's injuries, Lewis isn't admitting to having done anything to him that would have left him dead. Twenty-Fourth Judicial District Magistrate Commissioner Patricia Joyce ruled last week that the Sheriff's Office did indeed have probable cause to hold Lewis on suspicion of murder and abuse, but Lewis still gets to defend herself in court.

But what she has reportedly acknowledged doing in the name of discipline is itself criminal. Titus had a burn mark on his wrist. Lewis allegedly told deputies that she hit him with a hot fork after he reached for the hot stove.

No, Detective Burke says. "Whatever burned him was pressed on him."

According to authorities, Lewis also acknowledges taking a nail file and rubbing it between the cheeks of the boy's buttocks. This, she said, was her preferred potty training method. It left abrasions severe enough to be noted in the boy's autopsy.

You've got to think that Titus would have been quite the disciplined fellow if only he had managed to survive the discipline.